Barefoot player characters

We've had a big graphics update with the latest expansion and beyond including character overhaul with improved graphics, but we still can't have barefoot characters? NPC'S appear barefoot in events and cutscenes but why can't we have that on our own players? At this point this is al I'm asking for... :(

but think about our feet when we are sliding down on rails

Hey, the WoL can go toe to toe with some of the most dangerous monsters in the game setting wearing nothing but a (glamoured) swimsuit! I’m sure they can handle a little (glamoured) barefoot rail grinding.

Maybe they’re put off by the… dark side of such a thing as barefoot characters? Lol. Weird that they’re ok with ultra skimpy battle bikinis but not with barefeet, but that’s how it goes I guess lol

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Originally Posted by Connor

Maybe they’re put off by the… dark side of such a thing as barefoot characters?

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Have you met this community? A foot thing is the least weird thing I can think of that players get weird about...

Probably, but I don’t the devs are going to accept ‘it’s ok to let this happen because people want to / mod the game to / do even worse NSFW things’ as probable cause for allowing it lol, given how usually ‘pearl-clutching’ they are about things that could be ‘misconstrued’ I.E a ‘lie on ground’ emote.

Which, again, seems weirdly restrictive when they’re so eager to add skimpy bikinis or other things that could very easily be used for effectively the same thing (nsfw activity or imagery) lol. But that’s the hill they want to die on I guess?

I mean in my personal view like, it’s just pixel feet lol I don’t think it’s a big deal if people want to utilize that for a specific glamour or aesthetic or w/e. I don’t agree with their viewpoint that ‘anything that can be misconstrued should just never have been “construed” in the first place’ lol.

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Originally Posted by Araneathe

We've had a big graphics update with the latest expansion and beyond including character overhaul with improved graphics, but we still can't have barefoot characters? NPC'S appear barefoot in events and cutscenes but why can't we have that on our own players? At this point this is al I'm asking for... :(

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No worries, special aethereal transparent barefoot shoes will be added into FFXIV store for just the humble price of $27.99, as a part of item set with questionable items.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Which, again, seems weirdly restrictive when they’re so eager to add skimpy bikinis

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Right? I mean Ryne Ex exists and that is much much worse, esp with all the talk about certain lists right now. Being weird about feet is just odd at this point lol

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Originally Posted by MicahZerrshia

Right? I mean Ryne Ex exists and that is much much worse, esp with all the talk about certain lists right now. Being weird about feet is just odd at this point lol

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Agreed, plus we have bosses like Vamp Fatale that are plenty suggestive already. Like I think ‘someone not wearing shoes’ is the least of their worries in that regard lol

I hope some of you never visit a public beach or pool etc. ~ there are a lot of those scary weird things called bare feet D:

If we can run around in all sorts of revealing bikinis and other outfits that show a lot of skin in certain areas of the body, we should be allowed to run around with bare feet... where is the problem with that ? v.v

Edit:
- Ignore the first part, my sleepy brain read a few comments the wrong way :confused: :p

I'd be less irritated if we can at least dye the sandals we wear when we took off our footwear. But they don't... and they almost always conflict with every other pieces.. lol.

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Originally Posted by Valor_C

I hope some of you never visit a public beach or pool etc. ~ there are a lot of those scary weird things called bare feet D:

If we can around in all sorts of revealing bikinis and other outfits that show a lot of skin in certain areas of the body, we should be allowed to run around with bare feet... where is the problem with that ? v.v

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There's no problem with that, the only problem would be figuring out how to shove bare feet into mog station without causing massive backlash from players.

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Originally Posted by Valor_C

I hope some of you never visit a public beach or pool etc. ~ there are a lot of those scary weird things called bare feet D:

If we can around in all sorts of revealing bikinis and other outfits that show a lot of skin in certain areas of the body, we should be allowed to run around with bare feet... where is the problem with that ? v.v

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I don't think any of us are weirded out by bare feet lol it seems we all agree it should be a thing considering all the actual questionable stuff in this game already

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Originally Posted by Alicie

There's no problem with that, the only problem would be figuring out how to shove bare feet into mog station without causing massive backlash from players.

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Originally Posted by MicahZerrshia

I don't think any of us are weirded out by bare feet lol it seems we all agree it should be a thing considering all the actual questionable stuff in this game already

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Yeah... i read a few comments the wrong way, i guess i should wake up completely before reading and answering on comments ~ @.@

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Originally Posted by Connor

Maybe they’re put off by the… dark side of such a thing as barefoot characters? Lol. Weird that they’re ok with ultra skimpy battle bikinis but not with barefeet, but that’s how it goes I guess lol

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That might hold some water if they weren't completely fine with making other humanoid characters barefoot. Succubi don't wear sandals, Asura (most people probably forgot this boss existed) doesn't wear sandals, Shiva (Ryne edition, the questionable E8S 2nd phase one) doesn't wear sandals.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

That might hold some water if they weren't completely fine with making other humanoid characters barefoot. Succubi don't wear sandals, Asura (most people probably forgot this boss existed) doesn't wear sandals, Shiva (Ryne edition, the questionable E8S 2nd phase one) doesn't wear sandals.

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Honestly can’t say I was paying much attention to them so I didn’t even realise we had all these barefoot models already lol, but yeah it’s weird that they allowed these bosses (isn’t Shiva-Ryne in E8S literally wearing nothing but a dragon lol) but consider ‘barefoot players’ a no-go lol.

Also I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to hide behind something like ‘we don’t have the technology because the sandals are actually part of the model itself and we can’t code them off’ or something equally as silly lol.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Honestly can’t say I was paying much attention to them so I didn’t even realise we had all these barefoot models already lol, but yeah it’s weird that they allowed these bosses (isn’t Shiva-Ryne in E8S literally wearing nothing but a dragon lol) but consider ‘barefoot players’ a no-go lol.

Also I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to hide behind something like ‘we don’t have the technology because the sandals are actually part of the model itself and we can’t code them off’ or something equally as silly lol.

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I doubt it's any other problem than them still figuring out how to put it onto ffxiv store in a way to juice the most money out of players.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Honestly can’t say I was paying much attention to them so I didn’t even realise we had all these barefoot models already lol, but yeah it’s weird that they allowed these bosses (isn’t Shiva-Ryne in E8S literally wearing nothing but a dragon lol) but consider ‘barefoot players’ a no-go lol.

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I had to look it up as well, only remembered Asura because they're basically in your face during the intro cutscene.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Also I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to hide behind something like ‘we don’t have the technology because the sandals are actually part of the model itself and we can’t code them off’ or something equally as silly lol.

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I mean, kind of. They aren't a single model but they can't just delete the sandals either, the shape of the feet would be a complete mess since they were made to fit those sandals and your character would be floating slightly.
They obviously would need to make a barefoot model, but the bigger issue would probably be the floating.

They seem to be unable to dynamically alter our height...or I guess you could call it our "root" point, where our character meets the ground.
It's why all the shoes with high heels just cut off part of our ankles.
So they would probably need to make the ankles longer so the bare feet would actually touch the ground, which in turn would look rather goofy.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

They seem to be unable to dynamically alter our height...or I guess you could call it our "root" point, where our character meets the ground.

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They very well can. Any debuff/buff that alters character size does exactly that.

Not something I'm into it, but there's no reason other people can't have it.

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Originally Posted by Alicie

They very well can. Any debuff/buff that alters character size does exactly that.

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I probably should've phrased it better. They can alter our height but that just scales up the skeleton like the height slider does, it doesn't alter where our character's root sits on the z-axis. If they could do it then we would have high-heeled shoes that dynamically affect where our feet are in relation to the ground...like wearing actual heels does.

Once during the Stormblood expansion update it had a bug that deleted the barefoot sandals for my character. If update bug can do it pretty sure it wouldn't be hard for them to do the same.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

I probably should've phrased it better. They can alter our height but that just scales up the skeleton like the height slider does, it doesn't alter where our character's root sits on the z-axis. If they could do it then we would have high-heeled shoes that dynamically affect where our feet are in relation to the ground...like wearing actual heels does.

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Not just this, but we actually have a few shoes that have heels, and they make your character's leg shorter, this is extremely visible with 2B's boots, which have a rather high heel, try going barefoot, measuring your character's leg(as in, take a screenshot and measure the pixels), then equip 2B boots, and measure it again, it will make it very visible what is actually happening there.

...actually never mind, I will do it myself.

https://i.postimg.cc/wxhTPBRh/image.png

Any shoe with heels will need to do the same trick, and rescaling the character isn't an alternative because it won't simply make you taller, it will change your body proportions across the board, the sandals exist to give your character some clearance and not need for every single shoe in the game to do resize your legs.

In previous Moonfire Faire events they scattered a few female NPCs that have no shoes on at all with their swimsuits, since they modeled a sandalless Y'shtola for the scene where she got pulled from the lifestream. There's also a sandalless model for Lalafell because of the scene where Nanamo is recovering in her bed in HW. It is possible for them to do this, but it looks like since the heeled sandals are the shortest set height they have for characters with their legs unobscured (meaning they can't really hide any awkward anatomy adjustments behind long boots or long heels), the heel of the foot actually does float a bit from the ground when completely bare. I actually assume this is why they don't give us a barefoot model, rather than any other reason (though this is basically what Absurdity was saying too).

Personally, I don't really mind the slight floating and would like the have the option regardless... There are plenty of glamours and reasons as to why somebody might not want the awkward heeled sandals stuck to their feet and would think that compromise is worth it.

yes pls

not being able to be bare foot just seems oddly restrictiv.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

That might hold some water if they weren't completely fine with making other humanoid characters barefoot. Succubi don't wear sandals, Asura (most people probably forgot this boss existed) doesn't wear sandals, Shiva (Ryne edition, the questionable E8S 2nd phase one) doesn't wear sandals.

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Minfilia in her Word of the Mother outfit is barefoot, too. Straight up female midlander, good enough for us to use, already in the game and has been for a long time, too. But yeah, it is most likely the floating issues Doopliss mentioned. Still, I really wouldn't mind it since we also do plenty of regular floating on certain surfaces that are uneven/a little oddly made.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

I probably should've phrased it better. They can alter our height but that just scales up the skeleton like the height slider does, it doesn't alter where our character's root sits on the z-axis. If they could do it then we would have high-heeled shoes that dynamically affect where our feet are in relation to the ground...like wearing actual heels does.

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There's absolutely no issue throwing extra parameter in for gear called Y-offset and actually using it to calculate model offset relative to the ground. But you know, it's effort, even if it's very little effort, and any effort needs to be justified. Can they extract extra cash out of players by doing so? Questions, questions. People buy stuff from mog station regularly anyway, for now there's probably no urgent need to boost sales.

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Originally Posted by Alicie

There's absolutely no issue throwing extra parameter in for gear called Y-offset and actually using it to calculate model offset relative to the ground. But you know, it's effort, even if it's very little effort, and any effort needs to be justified. Can they extract extra cash out of players by doing so? Questions, questions. People buy stuff from mog station regularly anyway, for now there's probably no urgent need to boost sales.

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It sounds easy, but is it actually in practice? No clue how their engine does things, so who knows. If it were easy however it probably would have been less effort than having to shorten our legs/ankles every time they want to add heels to a pair of shoes.

A quick search tells me that plugins can already do this, but they also use a custom API. Wouldn't surprise me if some of the modding tools are better than whatever the devs have to work with.

And you're absolutely right, they would have to justify spending resources on a system like that, there probably isn't enough demand for it. I bet most people haven't even noticed that wearing heels doesn't make your character any taller, just your legs shorter.

Barefooted NPCs have shown up in the game before in some events around Costa Del Sol, there's a model in the game for it at least. They do look like they're standing on their toes.

Redoing all the heels and adding Y offsets seems like a bit of a waste of time, though changing the Y offset for just one barefoot model or just.. elongating the legs or feet a small bit wouldn't be so bad.

So this piqued my interest, and I grabbed the Endless Summer Sandals model to see how the bones are set up.

https://i.imgur.com/ROS8nMc.png

And they're mostly what you'd expect. Quite simple, in fact.

There's a small central bone (named "hara", possibly for "腹"/"stomach" or "belly") which when translated moves the whole body, and attached to it a larger "kosi" ("腰"/"waist") one which moves the whole lower body. There's also a chain of three "sebo" ("背骨"/"backbone") above it in other models, but shoes obviously don't need it. They're meant for rotation, but moving them a bit is fine if you want to stretch the belly.

From there, the bone structure splits off into a pair of five "asi" ("足"/"leg") each: Hips, two for the knees (standard industry practice to allow for less distortion of the patella area when animating it), ankle, and finally one each at the metatarsus (which is slightly off the ground, but then, so are many footwear models).

https://i.imgur.com/DvtD83o.png

Of importance for the discussion is that the last bone actually has corresponding weights in the toes, so it's not just used to determine where the feet should end up to be "on the surface". So to make the character stand on their toes, you can move the whole body by translating the root "hara" bone upwards, and adding rotation to the last two foot bones ("asi_d" and "asi_e").

https://i.imgur.com/17ExKLi.png

This doesn't shorten the legs, nor does it change the position (that's based on the object origin); it just makes the whole character taller by however much you translated the "hara" bone upwards.

https://i.imgur.com/F44LpdF.png

You can do very much the same in the opposite direction too.

The only remaining question is if the engine supports translating individual bones. Many early and even current simple ones only allow for rotation.

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Originally Posted by VeyaAkemi

Not just this, but we actually have a few shoes that have heels, and they make your character's leg shorter, this is extremely visible with 2B's boots, which have a rather high heel, try going barefoot, measuring your character's leg(as in, take a screenshot and measure the pixels), then equip 2B boots, and measure it again, it will make it very visible what is actually happening there.

...actually never mind, I will do it myself.

https://i.postimg.cc/wxhTPBRh/image.png

Any shoe with heels will need to do the same trick, and rescaling the character isn't an alternative because it won't simply make you taller, it will change your body proportions across the board, the sandals exist to give your character some clearance and not need for every single shoe in the game to do resize your legs.

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The characters in the game are split into multiple sections (chest, legs, ankles/feet, arms, forearms, hands, head, tail, etc). When you equip a pair of shoes the game swaps the feet model with the model of the shoes. In the case of those high heels, the 3D modelers just chose to model it that way, which essentially gets rid of the whole upper section of the feet part in order to make room for the whole heel. Shins look shorter with the heels as a result.

In short the shoes you equip can look like anything you want in theory as long as their upper part attaches to the bottom of the legs part. This of course generates anatomical differences between certain pieces like here. Not that character anatomy is correct especially on female characters in the first place anyway... (it's a mess)

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Originally Posted by LeCorbeaux

https://i.imgur.com/17ExKLi.png

This doesn't shorten the legs, nor does it change the position (that's based on the object origin); it just makes the whole character taller by however much you translated the "hara" bone upwards.

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Rotating the bones does not shorten your leg, the model itself already does.
As Valence has already said, every shoe is it's own separate model that entirely replaces your "bare" feet in sandals and just connects to your leg. Try overlaying something like the Summer Sunset Sandals over what you've imported there and you will quickly see what I mean.

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Originally Posted by LeCorbeaux

https://i.imgur.com/F44LpdF.png

You can do very much the same in the opposite direction too.

The only remaining question is if the engine supports translating individual bones. Many early and even current simple ones only allow for rotation.

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That's actually a good question. The only instances of individual bones moving up or down that we can currently find are all tied to animations (mount riding, facial expressions or "Joyous Leaping" emotes for example), not dynamically depending on footwear.

You can rotate the foot at the ankle but it wouldn't change anything about your position on the z-axis, your foot would simply clip into the ground undless you moved the entire rest of the "skeleton" up. The game also unfortunately doesn't have inverse kinematics, when standing on a slope you don't see one leg raised and one going straight down with the feet rotated to keep balance. You just stand as you always do, but part of you seemingly floating or clipping into the slope.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Rotating the bones does not shorten your leg, the model itself already does.

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Well, yes. And my point is: you wouldn't need to change the leg models to shorten (or lengthen, as the case with bare feet might be) them if the metadata on the shoes would have rotation and translation offsets for the relevant bones.

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Originally Posted by LeCorbeaux

Well, yes. And my point is: you wouldn't need to change the leg models to shorten (or lengthen, as the case with bare feet might be) them if the metadata on the shoes would have rotation and translation offsets for the relevant bones.

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True, but for that they would first need to be able to attach the metadata to shoes in the first place. I have no idea if they can.

When I said a barefoot model would either look goofy, because they need to make the ankles longer, or float it is with the current system (or lack thereof) in mind.
We currently have no indication that they can save bone rotation and offsets in the metadata for shoes, so I was working under that assumption.

If they have the ability to do so however they wouldn't even need multiple bones. Since every shoe is it's own model they could already bake the rotation of the ankle and toes into the mesh itself, so all they would need to save in the metadata is the offset for n_hara.

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Originally Posted by LeCorbeaux

Well, yes. And my point is: you wouldn't need to change the leg models to shorten (or lengthen, as the case with bare feet might be) them if the metadata on the shoes would have rotation and translation offsets for the relevant bones.

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What you're showing is twisting and changing the position of the "attach point" of the foot to the lower leg (located at the top of the foot). Rotating as you did changes the position of the kinetics of the skeleton, and for this to work you need to use said point of attach as the base unchanging reference around which you do any operation (rotation, etc). That attach point CANNOT be altered or moved around, else your feet suddenly detaches from the leg. In more technical terms you're thinking in normal kinematics instead of inverse kinematics.

The only way to ensure that the character sticks to the ground is for the devs to stop using the same fixed Y position (altitude), and attach a new variable to foot gear that would adjust the altitude of the entire character model to fit with the boots or lack of boots you do use - like in reality, shorter shoes, your body will stand lower in relation to the ground than on higher heels. It's not something you can fix by adjusting bones.

Because if you want to truly laugh, just compare some foot gear models with super thick soles and suddenly the feet are located way higher than barefoot which means a part of your ankles were actually cut off just to fit the model. There is zero consistency between foot gear models, which includes the barefoot one.

It would be an extremely easy job for them if we consider that modders executed this perfectly without mistakes. Including heights and so on.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

The game also unfortunately doesn't have inverse kinematics, when standing on a slope you don't see one leg raised and one going straight down with the feet rotated to keep balance. You just stand as you always do, but part of you seemingly floating or clipping into the slope.

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Yeah, I mean I agree with most of this thread, I highly advocated for them to upgrade the poly count on both the hands and the feet for the graphics update. Kinematics would be cool if they can do something like that on slopes. There's also some cool gear that could be introduced with this like the gaiters that Mithra wore in the starter gear in FFXI.

A lot of sandals and low profile shoes would look great too along with some more feral looking gear.

But yeah I sense they don't want to, even though they should. Also what doesn't help is that there is so much weirdness around feet, and people just like to exacerbate it by mentioning it in every single thread that discusses the topic that there's basically a stigma around it now. So no, talking about feet shouldn't induce this mentality of hey lets make it awkward so no one wants to mention or touch the subject. It only makes people not want to be involved in any of it because of those people.